Wednesday 5 January 2011 03.00 EST
First published on Wednesday 5 January 2011 03.00 EST

Darian Leader is critical of proposals for the statutory regulation of psychotherapists (Therapy shows us life is not neat or safe. So why judge it by those criteria?, 10 December). He says that the Health Professions Council's framework cannot be "sensitive to the particularity of therapy" and that psychotherapy cannot be "shoehorned" into the same regulatory package as other professionals.

As chair of the HPC, I believe he is mistaken. He says we are a regulator of "medical-style intervention", yet we already regulate art psychotherapists, music therapists and psychologists. We do not operate on a medical model. Our objective is to protect the health and wellbeing of people using the services of professions working in the health, education and psychological arenas. We want the public to know that a therapist has been trained and continues actively to pursue professional development, and that if they step over the bounds of trust they will be dealt with fairly and transparently.

Under the current self-regulatory system for psychotherapists, individuals who have had a complaint made against them can simply move to another area, relinquish their voluntary professional body membership, or find themselves before a panel of fellow professionals reluctant to take action against another therapist. The patient who complains may well find themselves having to fund the costs of the hearing, which can be a disincentive to making the complaint in the first place.

What makes us different from the current system of self-regulation for psychotherapy is that we work in partnership with members of the public as well as the professions; we hold hearings in the open, in the public eye, and at no cost to the person who complains; and we have nationally agreed standards of conduct and ethics. At the moment there are 215,000 individuals on our register, who are signed up to principles of professional autonomy and public accountability.

Our interest is simple: we want to put in place a legal framework to protect the public from the minority of therapists who fail to treat their clients as equals, who abuse their position of power.

Leader is also wrong to state that patients will no longer be "able to choose the therapist they want to work with". We do not discriminate between disciplines or traditions of therapy. Where patients do have the opportunity to choose, they will continue to be able to do so. What we are proposing will support a therapist in creating that "unique space" in therapy. Those on our register are signed up to providing open, respectful therapy, delivered within a discipline of self-awareness and self-development.

Finally, I do not see this work "losing steam" at all. At a meeting last month, members of the psychotherapy profession brought a revised set of standards for their profession which were welcomed as a major step in the journey towards independent regulation. These standards were developed by the profession for the profession, in collaboration with the HPC.